


Think by Feeling

by Etheostoma



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Angst, Angsty Javert, Domestic, Fix-It, Hurt/Comfort, I Can't Help It I'm Sorry, Javert Has a Nightmare, Javert Lives, M/M, Post-Seine, choose your own timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-18 13:47:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29490819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Etheostoma/pseuds/Etheostoma
Summary: “Again?” Valjean asked, and some lingering tendril of the darkness within Javert quails from the affection packed into that single word. He quakes in his lover’s arms, hand rising to clutch at the scarred wrists that press against his hips.“Yes,” he croaks, voice hoarse from disuse.Valjean says nothing in reply, but dips his head to press a kiss to Javert’s chest where his heart beats sluggishly against the confines of its fleshy prison.(otherwise known as Javert Has a Nightmare)
Relationships: Javert & Jean Valjean, Javert/Jean Valjean
Comments: 5
Kudos: 35





	Think by Feeling

Heart hammering in his chest, Javert awakens with a gasp, lurching upright and sending bed coverings tumbling in every direction. His skin is clammy with drying sweat, the sheets tangled among his legs unpleasantly damp against his skin. He breathes out a shuddering breath, blinking against the darkness, his eyes darting unseeingly around the pitch-black of the bedroom as he wills his racing pulse to slow.

The darkness offers no reply beyond the echoes of his pounding heart. Arm trembling, he raises one hand to his face, long fingers tracing the deep creases of his brow. The details of his nightmare are already fading, fleeing into the night like the a wave receding from a beach, but he remains rattled, disjointed. Such feelings leave him feeling ill at ease, restless and tense in a way he hasn’t been since those endless weeks following his plunge into the Seine.

Javert cannot help but shudder at that thought. His limbs grow heavy, body weighted down by countless tons of crushing water he can feel but cannot see. He flails, reaches out, flings an arm out to the side and catches the edge of Valjean’s sleep shirt between his grasping fingers. The coarse fabric is grounding, solid in his grip and pressing tightly into his skin. It anchors him, binds him to this yet-unrealistic reality more tightly than can any conscious though.

Wrenching himself back to the present, he tilts his head to stare down at the other side of the bed, hoping that his nighttime weakness has not disturbed his partner as well. Valjean, however, slumbers on, unknowing and unaware of Javert’s midnight demons. The bulk of his chest—still that of a man half his age—rises and falls with deep, even breaths, his head tucked against the pillow and one hand half-extended to the dent in the mattress where Javert had until just recently rested.

“Sleep,” Javert murmurs. His heart is fuller than he can bear, fit to bursting with a rush of affection that he cannot stopper. It is very nearly painful, that surge of emotion flooding an organ as-yet unaccustomed to such. Grimacing, Javert grips at his own chest with one hand, chasing that phantom sensation as his fingers dig into his skin through the fabric of his shirt. Despite his efforts the symptoms persist. He finds himself instead twisting to trail his free hand down and across that beloved face beside him, fingers skimming across weathered skin. Valjean’s beard rasps against the pads of his fingers, his breath ghosting across the tender meat of Javert’s palm. The touch is light enough to be imagined, yet true enough to send currents of sensation shooting through synapses until his heart and mind are fit to bursting.

Gently, Javert curls that palm to fit the curve of Valjean’s jaw, smoothing his thumb across those plush, parted pink lips. He lifts his hand to pass across the fine white strands of hair at Valjean’s brow. In this moment, he can almost forget the traces of horror that still lick at his heels, ignore the remnants of the nightmare watching him with hungry eyes from the shadows of their room.

What he _cannot_ ignore is the water that is rising even now about his legs. It floods in about him, a phantom current streaming by the bed in the dark. He shudders, body angling instinctively toward Valjean’s slumbering form as a tremor works its way through him. He wants nothing more than to curl back up against Valjean, tuck that broad chest against his back and bring one of those strong, solid arms against his own heart, fading back into oblivion for the remainder of the night.

He is also well aware that this will not happen. There is no more sleep to be had for him.

Fabric rustles as Javert slides from the bed, rising with a groan and creaking knees. His feet quail at the touch of the cold hardwood floor, toes curling inward in protest. Quickly, he scrambles for the thick pair of stockings that rest on the chair next to the bed, shoving them unceremoniouslyonto feet now white with cold. His back cracks loudly in protest at the sudden shift in posture, and he grunts as he rises to his full height, silver-touched hair falling in messy hanks around his eyes. Briefly, he toys with tying it back before deciding to simply let it be.

Out of the covers and away from his living-furnace of a partner, the cold of the night is even more pronounced. Javert shudders at its toothy bite. He scrambles over to the door, where his and Valjean’s dressing gowns hang on hooks on the wall. He eyes the mass of fabric, trying to size them up in the dark. Failing, he grumbles and grabs one at random, flinging it about his shoulders. He immediately realizes it is Valjean’s, as it swallows his leaner frame and smells strongly of the man himself. Still, the fabric is warm, for all that it rises far higher than his own, and the familiar scent of his lover is a comfort to his raging mind—it will do far better than his own in this instance.

For a long moment, he simply stands there in the dark, leaning against the door, eyes closed and thoughts scattered in amillion different directions as he breathes in Valjean’s familiar scent. There is a trace of the soap Valjean uses in the bath, the faintest hint of rain and fresh leaves and earthen reality that seems to cling to the man like a second skin, and a sweet, musky aroma that is Valjean’s alone. It is grounding in a way the waking world alone is not.

Finally, Javert stirs once more, mind hazy and cluttered. He shuffles out the door and into the sitting room. He falters for a moment, staggering into the bookshelf before falling back onto the opposite settee. His elbows dig into his knees, bone burying itself into muscle to the point of pain. With a grimace, Javert tips his head down into his palms, hair falling around him in a cascade of messy frosted waves.

His nightmare is still an elusive beast, but the overwhelming helplessness and despair that had engulfed him just before waking sit waiting in the wings, eager to be summoned anew and chew away at his psyche from within. Even now they threaten to swallow him whole.

His fingers contract, digging into his temples.

The pain is good, grounding. It ties him to the present, draws him away from the untamable current that sucks him down, down into the abyss with its clutching, desperate fingers. It keeps him _here_ , seated on Valjean’s threadbare-but-comfortable settee, instead of tangled in the weeds at the bottom of the Seine. It anchors him to the reality where he has come to cherish Valjean as the center of his universe, rather than rue every day the recidivist roams free.

The pain is good, but it is not a cure. Javert straightens slowly, staring vacantly at the bookshelf to which he owes a new bruise on his hipbone. His fists clench on his knees, nails tearing into the meat of his palms. Still the darkness gnaws at him, dives in with ruthless beaks and tearing claws to pull away chunks of vulnerable flesh. It is a nameless despair and an aching vacuum of loneliness that refuses to be quelled.

Javert shakes like a leaf, head bowing, arms now curling about himself and leaving tiny pinpricks of blood smeared across the sleeves of Valjean’s dressing gown.

He relives those first terrifying months of uncertainty, day after day dragging on where he was forced to live and yet did not know how. He drowns and drowns again, only this time there is no Jean Valjean to catch his limp form and fling him out of the water and up on to the muddy, scum-ridden banks of the river. He sees every rise and fall of the whip he wields at Toulon, the eyes of every convict he put behind bars as an Inspector. He quails beneath the accusations in their dark gazes.His demons dog his footsteps, unrelenting and unforgiving and entirely uncaring of how he has changed.

Javert clenches his teeth so hard his jaw ached, taking one deep, shuddering breath after another. To still be so weak, even now— To be _accepted_ in this house when, _even now_ he harbors such darkness—

He gasps audibly, shakily, chest heaving and water pooling at the corners of his eyes, furiously scrubbed away before it has time to fully form or fall. He can handle nearly _anything_ , has stared death straight in its hollow eyes and laughed. He has walked into oblivion, and oblivion has spat him back out with nary a backward glance. He can handle anything, anything but _this_ —this great, wrenching feeling of hopelessness and loss, the absolute and utter certainty that all is for naught. He cannot help but feel that everything that makes his current pitiful existence worth something is fragile as glass, newly-minted and simply awaiting the moment when he will land the final, shattering blow.

His nerves teeter on a precipice, the dark despair of his dream threatening to again overwhelm him—

Teeth clenched, he wills his nerves to settle, forcing his galloping pulse into submission and cowing his raging anxiety. It balks, resisting, and he forces its head down like that of an unruly horse. Gradually fear becomes obsolete, swallowed by the grey void of nothingness into which he forces his mind.

Javert rises, crosses to the window and tips his head up to stare out at the midnight sky. His eyes catch on the stars, flickering in the light of a crescent moon. He links his hands behind his back and stares at attention, breath frosting against the frigid glass windowpane. It is freezing outside, but he can barely feel it anymore—his entire being is frozen.

Time passes in disjointed fits, minutes bleeding together until Javert is uncertain precisely how long he has been standing at the window, or even how long it has been since he last blinked. All he knows is the cold and the dark, until even the once-familiar pinpricks of the distant stars seem to gleam with a strange, ill intent.

Warm hands settle on Javert’s shoulders, jolting him out of his reverie. They hold him fast and draw him back against a solid chest, warm with living heat. He is so frozen he barely notices, his heart thawing just enough to allow him to curl back into that familiar embrace. He cannot bear to turn, cannot even bring himself to move beyond folding back against the sturdy form behind him. Valjean’s palms slide from Javert’s shoulders down to his chest, wrapping snugly about him and simply holding him.

“Again?” Valjean asked, and some lingering tendril of the darkness within Javert quails from the affection packed into that single word. He quakes in his lover’s arms, hand rising to clutch at the scarred wrists that press against his hips.

“Yes,” he croaks, voice hoarse from disuse.

Valjean says nothing in reply, but dips his head to press a kiss to Javert’s throat where his pulse beats sluggishly against the confines of its fleshy prison. His arms tighten against Javert, slide upward to wrap around his sternum, and he squeezes, steady and sturdy and resoundingly _present,_ a light to combat any darkness.

Javert’s hands press against Valjean, large palms and long fingers flattening across strong forearms dusted with snow-white hair. Valjean’s skin is pale beneath his own, nearly white from being hidden for years beneath his shirtsleeves, always a lighter shade than the telltale darker hue of Javert’s own mixed heritage.

“I always think I am free of it,” he finally says. His eyes are closed, his face downturned—refusing to face reality directly even as he confesses to it. “I always think I’ve become a better man, graduated in God’s eyes to at least be deserving of His ambivalence, if not His regard, and then—“ He quakes like a leaf. “Then I dream, and remember, and regret—all the things I have said, and done, and the wrongs I have performed in the name of _justice—“_ He spits the words like a poison, head hanging limply between his shoulders and hair falling in limp hanks about his eyes, an iron curtain separating him from Valjean and the concern and care he knows he will find in those hazel eyes.

“I do not belong here,” he confesses quietly. “I should be rotting in the Seine, entombed in weeds and silt. I should lie dead and forgotten, not warm and cherished by the one whom I have wronged the most.”

Valjean does object then, a sharp exclamation of protest that tears itself from his lips. Javert can feel his arms contract as it does, and then suddenly he is spinning, turned faster than he can physically comprehend, chest-to-chest with the other man as he steps back to the settee in three quick, efficient steps. Drawing Javert with him, he settles them both down onto the waiting cushions. He folds himself around Javert, tucks the younger man into his embrace and rests his head on the top of that mane of silvery hair, hands rising to sink into the unruly mess and hold him fast. “I love you,” he professes. “Deeply and most ardently. Our past shapes us into who we are today, my dear, but it does not _define_ us.” Those large hands card through Javert’s hair, press his face tenderly against Valjean’s neck as he breathes in a series of short, stuttering breaths. “We are, who we choose to become—and God forgives, and never forgets. He can see the man you were, _and_ the man you have allowed yourself to learn to be.”

Valjean chuckles, his eyes glinting in the streak of silver moonlight that peeks through the windowpane. “What are we two old sinners if not the living iterations of a second chance?”

Javert trembles in his arms, and Valjean feels a trail of wetness trickle down along his neck. Silent but for his heaving breaths, Javert plasters himself against Valjean, contorting his longer frame to fit against Valjean’s stronger one like two conjoining pieces of a puzzle. A very distant part of himself realizes that Valjean wears his own dressing gown, the fabric stretched tightly across those broad shoulders and well-defined arms. “I feel weak,” Javert confesses. “I have no purpose in this life, this lie. Everything I once knew is wrong, but for you. You are _everything,_ Valjean, everything to me. My world revolves entirely around you, for you have become my world. How can _I_ of all people be trusted with your happiness, when I was the one to ruin it so thoroughly before?”

Words have never come easily to him—he far prefers action to intent. To speak his mind and emotions so frankly, and to be held within the thrall of a state to which he would have been unguardedly disdainful in his previous life is not easy for Javert. He forces the words from between clenched teeth, bites off the statements in short, brittle sentences whose eloquence belies the outright struggle he faces to even give them voice.

Valjean, though—Valjean _knows._ He _understands._ He raises one hand to cup the arch of Javert’s neck, brings his thumb around to press against his fluttering jugular in a sweeping caress of flesh. “ _This_ is why,” he murmurs. Their mouths are now close enough to touch, sharing breath and air between them and but a hair’s breadth away from coming together as one. “You care now, do you not?”

Javert’s throat jumps beneath Valjean's palm as he nods, icy eyes clouded with some indecipherable emotion. His pulse flutters rapidly, a fragile fledgeling bird struggling to take flight. “You feel, Javert, and you have regrets, and remorse, and respect for those you feel you have wronged.” Valjean closes the scant distance between them and presses his lips against Javert’s in a gentle caress. “And you _love.”_

His quiet words and solid bulk offer everything the empty night air had not. He is an unquenchable blaze of affection and truth, a furnace of glowing embers and smoldering wood that refuses to be extinguished. His certainty in redemption, in _Javert’s_ redemption, gallops in on a flaming stallion, pursues all of the unhappy thoughts that have plagued Javert since waking and bars them from his mind with a roar and rush of warmth.

“I love _you.”_ It is a confession, wrenched from a throat that refuses to speak and offered up like the greatest of sins. “I do not know that I love any other, but you I love above all.” One thumb smooths along the threadbare sleeve of his gown, tight about the brawny arm which it currently covers. “I would see myself dead before I allowed any harm to come to you, by my hand or any other.”

Valjean hums low in his throat, a comforting rumble that carves new surfaces across Javert’s craggy heart. “I love you too,” he replies, eyes wide and guileless and daring Javert to object. “This is what love is—we support, and we protect, and we chase each others nightmares until they become memories and not a foe to be defeated.”

Mouth pressed tightly into a thin line, Javert nods once, jerkily offering his assent. “I do not do this well.” It is a confession as much a statement, an admission of shortcoming that rips itself from his resisting throat. “Affection. _Love._ ” He slips his hand between the gap in the dressing gown Valjean wears, fingers smoothing across the bunched fabric of his nightshirt. His questing hands trip and trail across that taut abdomen, flatten out at Valjean’s hip, thumb dipping to play with the shirt’s fraying hem.

Valjean shakes with quiet laughter, nestling in against Javert’s neck to mouth soft kisses at the hollow of his throat. He does not need to say that they are equals in their uncertainty, that they are stumbling forward into this fledgling relationship with matched insecurities and inexperience. It is implied in his still-tentative exploration of Javert’s skin, in the way they are still learning one-another even after all of these months together.

Valjean knows well how Javert likes to be touched on the inside of his thigh, _just so_ , and how he quakes when Valjean sucks at that particular spot just below his collarbone and brings a slick finger down to circle and push and prepare. He knows the sounds he can wring from that throat, the moans and gasps he can drag from Javert with each caress, each thrust and collision and the friction between their bodies.

Despite this knowledge, each time they come together is as though it were the first, that heady rush of sensation still so new to each of them that it threatens to overwhelm them entirely. It is a delicate give-and-take between them, an unanticipated reversal of roles that suits them both far more than they would have ever anticipated.

Javert yields to Valjean’s affections as he has never yielded to anything or anyone else in his life. He cannot say it, cannot give voice to the emotions that have wound themselves up and around his heartstrings, but he cherishes each moment where he can show Valjean such, even if he cannot tell him. To be held and _loved_ , and repeatedly made to endure being _told_ such—that alone is a heady enough experience to bring him to the brink before Valjean can even touch him.

Questing hands settle and calm, fiery lust dimming to a warm, unquenchable flame. Javert finds himself resting with his cheek pressed to Valjean’s chest, tucked up against the other man’s heart. He breathes deeply through his nose, eyes fluttering shut despite his earlier conviction that he would sleep no more any night. Valjean’s hand rests at the crown of his head, smoothing through his sleek hair in a slow caress. It is a soothing caress, that wide hand and calloused palm and thick fingers trailing through the long silvery strands from crown to tip.

He opens his mouth and falters, uncertain as to what he actually intended to say. Valjean is warm, and solid beneath and against him, his heartbeat a steady metronome dragging Javert closer and closer to sleep’s embrace with each heavy pulse. He thinks perhaps he had meant to suggest they return to bed, clamber back in together and press up against one another beneath the sheets where it is warm and the draft from the window cannot reach—but Valjean is warmer than any coverings, and sturdy where Javert’s pillow is not, and a brighter light than any dark nightmare can hope to quench.

Instead, he reaches upward with fumbling fingers, finds the hand that rests against his shoulder blade and tugs it down between them to press against his _own_ heart. It is not much, but it is all he has to offer. As he feels Valjean’s palm flatten and spread protectively over that tender offering, he thinks perhaps all he has to offer is in fact more than enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks as always for reading and supporting my much-belated venture into this most beloved fandom!


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